Bill Rees likes to say that ecological footprint analysis began with an epiphany—when he was 10 years old. Sitting down to lunch on his grandparents’ Ontario farm with relatives he had worked with…
Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom in most liberal/left circles was that people concerned about population growth tended to be racists, nativists, and eugenicists. And mostly old white guys,…
Wes Jackson’s career demonstrates that sometimes the race goes not to the swift but to the unconventional, that the battle can be won not only by the strong but by…
My nomination for the most predictable platitude invoked by university professors when describing the essence of their job is “teaching students to think for themselves.” During my 26 years at…
From social media influencers to academic theorists, preachers and politicians, everyone weighs in on the question of what makes a good man, especially what young men need to do embrace…
[This essay is adapted from It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics] Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on…
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York…
Anyone who has critiqued, or even dared to question, the ideology of the transgender movement likely has been accused of being a “biological essentialist.” The most recent episode of this…
After election defeats, political writers are quick to explain that if only the politicians had read my book and followed my advice, things would have been different for our side.…
“Where do you find hope?” “How do you sustain hope?” Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s…
Here’s one possible trajectory for ambitious print journalists. After making your name with aggressive reporting at a smaller newspaper, move up the ladder until you are at a top paper…
We need to be practical when it comes to politics, to work for policies that we can enact today, inadequate though they may be to answer calls for social justice…
There’s a sad irony at the heart of Janice Raymond’s new book on transgenderism and feminism. After decades of research and activism, she is uniquely qualified to contribute to the…
[An earlier version of this essay was presented to the National Conference on Racial and Social Justice on November 17, 2021.] We are at a tipping point in the racial history of…
[This is an expanded version of testimony delivered to the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, November 2, 2021.] My thesis: The pornography industry does the worst to…
Although the rather inelegant term “allyship” had not yet become part of the social-justice lexicon, I first bumped into the complexity of being an ally in 1988 when I belatedly…
“We told you so” rings hollow. In the face of tens of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars spent, and countless communities destroyed, pointing out that early critics…
Abstract The stability of the Earth’s ecosystems, and hence the future of the human species, depends on people recognizing and responding to multiple, cascading social and ecological crises that can…
When a European graduate student emailed to ask if I would participate in an assignment to “do an interview with one of my favourite authors,” I said yes. My books…
Who is “we”? We humans have made a mess of things, which is readily evident if we face the avalanche of studies and statistics describing the contemporary ecological crises we face. But even with the…
The political left, and much of mainstream feminism, is characterized by an analysis of how systems and institutions shape our choices, a critique of capitalist media, and a commitment to…
In the current squabble on the liberal/progressive/left side of the fence over so-called “cancel culture”—in which one open letter in favor of freedom of expression led to a rebuttal open…
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back is a thoughtful, engaging book that ends in failure. But Mark O’Connell shouldn’t take that…
The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent by P. E. Moskowitz (Bold Type Books, 2019) In my last couple years of university…
Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, has one crippling flaw—it’s inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple,…
A version of this essay was presented at the “Is the Future of Agriculture Perennial?” conference, Lund University, Sweden, May 8, 2019. The royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions in the Hebrew and…
I am not as abusive as Harvey Weinstein, nor as narcissistic as Bill O’Reilly. I’m more respectful to women than Donald Trump, and not as sleazy as Anthony Weiner. Judged…
Now that the violence in Charlottesville has forced “white supremacy” into our political vocabulary, let's ask an uncomfortable question: “When will the United States transcend white supremacy?” My question…
Naomi Klein understands that President Donald J. Trump is a problem, but he is not the problem. In her new book, “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need”,…
When a local organizer for a new adult education project in Austin, Texas, asked me to teach a course on politics in January, it was tempting to focus on the…
We are better people, individually and collectively, when we reject hubris and embrace humility, and we stand a better chance of making real progress — defined by Rowe as “whatever is conducive…
Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, many people call for us to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete…
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